1. Don Quijote (1605,
1615) is often taken to be the founding moment of the European
novel, a form that is in turn frequently understood to be a uniquely
original invention of the western tip of Eurasia that has proven
to be the dominant literary genre of the modern world. Although
all of these claims can be disputed, few would deny Don Quijote's
significance for the European novel, the prominence of the novel
form in European literature since the eighteenth century, or
the global influence it has subsequently exerted. Despite my
sympathy for the stronger versions of these assertions, in what
follows I assume only the weaker. My aim is to position the European
novel intercontinentally, not by showing that The Tale of
Genji, for instance, is or is not a novel, but by considering
the non-European dimension of European fiction. Inevitably, such
a project relies on a certain view of European imperialism since
the mid-fifteenth century. My own understanding, which seems
to be broadly though not universally shared by Marxist and non-Marxist
historians alike, is that European overseas expansion was primarily
a product rather than a source of internal economic change --
the development of capitalism -- though of course the effect
also became a cause.2
Here, too, however, I assume only a weaker, less controversial
claim -- that Europe, including eventually its most powerful
settler colony, was engaged in continual if uneven imperial expansion
from 1450 to 1900. Similarly, I subscribe to the linkage of the
realist novel with both the middle class and with nationalism
(though this connection does not at first glance seem to hold
until the eighteenth century).3
But I assume only the weaker, commonsensical position that realism
entails the serious treatment of everyday life. In all three
instances, the weaker formulation allows the ensuing argument
to work, whereas the stronger gives it greater resonance, at
least in my view.
2. Put another way, a traditionally
historical materialist approach, in which broad social and economic
developments provide fundamental conditions of possibility for
literature, here functions mainly as a point of departure for
understanding the structured relationship between opportunity
and constraint in various literary forms. If a form enables you
to do this, it prevents you from doing that. The
approach is therefore formalist throughout, the goal being some
insight into the relationship between ideology and form. Because
forms are inherently ideological, they may prove recalcitrant
or receptive to specific ideological projects. Within literary
study today, this assertion cuts against a broadly culturalist
or discursive approach, for which in principle all forms -- literary
or not, verbal or not -- are equally grist for the mill. It seems
to me, however, that literary critics can most effectively contribute
to a larger project of cultural studies or social critique by
retaining contact with our one area of cross-disciplinary comparative
advantage -- the formal analysis of verbal practices and objects.
The connection between this advantage and the unusual responsiveness
of literary criticism, among academic disciplines in the United
States, to contemporary cultural change is not an obvious one.
I do not pursue it below, and even the more general defense of
formalism remains implicit in the specific historical account.
I argue, perhaps unexpectedly or even counterintuitively, that
the origins of the European novel are to be located outside Europe,
that its main line of development in the centuries after Cervantes
proved ill-suited to cross-continental forays -- this despite
the considerable body of scholarship in recent decades linking
the novel to imperial expansion -- and, finally, that the ultimate
trans-European success of the form inheres in the very characteristics
that long impeded an extra-European dimension. I begin by looking
at Cervantes in detail, before paddling upstream briefly in search
of sources. I conclude at somewhat greater length with an overview
of the ocean of fiction that is in some sense part of the Cervantine
legacy.
3. Much about the life and work
of the author of Don Quijote points in the direction of
empire. Cervantes fought -- and was maimed -- at the Battle of
Lepanto, he was imprisoned for five years in Algiers following
capture by Barbary pirates (1575-80), he unsuccessfully applied
for posts in America, and he commissioned supplies for the Spanish
Armada. Many of his writings evince an overt interest in imperial
issues -- in general, in America, and above all in relation to
Muslim civilization.4
4. Cervantes claims to have had
twenty-to-thirty plays performed between 1580 and 1587.5 Only two or three survive, one of which is based
on his captivity. The names of eight or nine plays, among them
the survivors, are known from a list Cervantes provided late
in life,6 three or four
of which also seem to exploit Cervantes's own experiences with
the Islamic world more generally and the interest that the subject
elicited on the stage.7
In 1615 Cervantes published eight more full-length plays, and
three of these return to the drama of Christian imprisonment
in the Islamic world. In short, almost half his extant plays,
in addition to a significant percentage of the lost works, focus
on Muslim-Christian relations. In the medium of prose fiction
the same is true of one of the stories printed in the Novelas
ejemplares (Exemplary Novellas, 1613).8 Though not concerned with Islam, another from
the same collection evidences Cervantes's characteristic concern
with different, even alien cultures. But in general the Novelas
seem to allude more often to the Americas, a topic that becomes
increasingly prominent late in the author's career.9
5. Much the same is true of Don
Quijote. The first part contains the lengthy Captive's Tale,
which is often thought to be based on Cervantes's own experience
in Algiers. The second reverts to the topic a bit more briefly
in the account of the covert return to Spain of Ricote the morisco
(a Moor converted to Christianity) and of his daughter following
the royal decree of 1609 that expelled the moriscos. The
entire work was ostensibly composed in Arabic by the Arab historian
Cide Hamete Benengeli and translated into Spanish by a morisco
youth. And speculation continues to this day on Cervantes's possible
converso background -- that is, his Jewish descent.10 Similarly, Don Quijote
refers to the New World on various occasions -- the Captive's
brothers whose fortunes come from America, the priest's fictitious
tale of wealth from the Indies, Sancho Panza's scheme to sell
off into slavery the inhabitants of the fictitious Princess Micomicona's
Guinea, as well as several other passing allusions.11 The work draws on Ercilla's La Araucana
(a skeptical eyewitness account of the Spanish conquest of Chilean
Indians), may derive one of the alternative names of its protagonist
-- Quesada -- from America, and perhaps turns to the utopian
tradition begun by More for part of Sancho Panza's gubernatorial
experience on the fictitious Island of Barataria. More fundamentally,
the critique of chivalric fiction that is the overt object of
attack in Don Quijote has for centuries been understood
as a commentary on the Spanish aristocracy and, by extension,
on the conquistadores and more generally on Spain's entire
imperial enterprise in the New World and elsewhere.12 This position has proven remarkably resistant
to shifts in ideological fashion. Thus, one can argue that the
novel nostalgically evokes the glory days of Spanish imperialism,
epitomized by Lepanto and now slipping irretrievably away. Alternatively,
one can take Cervantes -- or the narrator, or the translator,
or Cide Hamete Benengeli -- at his word and find a thoroughgoing
critique of empire. I will return to these competing interpretations
below from a structural perspective. Here it is worth noting
that this latter reading easily forks into a celebration of the
text for its anti-imperialist leanings (the dominant mode today)
or a decrying of its damage to the European effort at empire-building
(a more common motif in previous eras). In short, though one
might disagree about the stance of the work and the political
value of that stance, Don Quijote would seem to be profoundly
connected with Spanish imperialism.
6. There is a problem with this
line of argument, however, and it is an obvious one. Some of
Cervantes's plays are about the Muslim world; the same can be
said of barely more than five per cent of Don Quijote.
The situation is even worse with respect to America. The New
World is the central concern of La Araucana, as well as
of a number of plays, though not the most celebrated ones, by
the leading dramatists of the Golden Age -- Lope de Vega, Tirso
de Molina, and Calderón de la Barca. None of Cervantes's
works fits this mold, however, and even within his oeuvre
a stronger case can be made for a relatively direct, extended
meditation on America and empire in Los trabajos de Persiles
y Sigismunda (The Travails of Persiles and Sigismunda,
1617) than in Don Quijote. Furthermore, unlike the major
poems of, for instance, Tasso and Spenser, Don Quijote
does not come equipped with an authorial key to its allegorical
significance that might open the door to an American interpretation.
It is manifestly written in a different register. Finally, though
censorship was tighter shortly after 1600 than it had been a
century earlier, this did not prevent complaints about the Indies
from appearing in print. From this perspective, then, Don
Quijote is not about America, not much about Islam in Spain,
the Mediterranean, or north Africa, and only intermittently concerned
at all with the question of empire in general. It has very little
to say about intra-Christian conflict on the Hispanic peninsula
(more pressing around 1580 and again in the 1640s), or Spanish
wars in Europe (the novel's second part having been composed
during the Dutch truce of 1609-21 and before the onset of the
Thirty Years' War in 1618). This is important because it is Don
Quijote, and not the more openly imperial (or anti-imperial)
works of Cervantes or his Spanish contemporaries that is arguably
one of the most distinguished and certainly one of the most influential
literary products of the Renaissance and perhaps of European
culture.13 The relative
indifference to empire in Don Quijote may have no bearing
one way or the other on its achievement or impact. I will argue,
however, that it does, that the significance of the work depends
on its relegation of empire to the background. As will become
clear, though this approach appears to scale down the importance
of the novel's non-European and implicitly anti-imperial elements,
it nonetheless takes them seriously. The path to this conclusion
leads through an interlinked discussion of literary history and
literary form.
7. First, to the extent that by
means of the everyday reality of Spain, Don Quijote seeks
to discredit chivalric romance as well as the ideologies, practices,
and social structures to which it was related, a direct depiction
of Spanish imperialism is all but excluded. Notice the potential
paradox. Even if the enduring interpretive tradition noted earlier
is correct in associating the critique of chivalric romance with
the opposition to empire -- as I think it is, in part -- the
very mode of that critique precludes the overt portrayal of the
object of attack. Routine existence in Spain undercuts chivalric
romance and by extension imperial adventure, but that adventure
occurs outside Spain and hence beyond the limits of the novel.
Arising as it does from the distinctive strategy of Don Quijote,
this bifurcation between vehicle and tenor might seem fortuitous,
and hence of scant import for prose fiction in general. But it
is not. Rather, as we will see, this scissors effect inheres
in the strategy of novelistic realism, even when -- or perhaps
even more when -- the novel becomes standardized around a shaped
plot of the sort that Don Quijote clearly lacks. What
appears to be a local strategy in Cervantes emerges at only a
slightly higher level of generality as the core project of subsequent
European fiction -- the representation of ordinary private life
with high artistic seriousness. This project had profound implications
for the portrayal of the non-European world over the course of
three centuries. Insofar as the realist novel sought to depict
imperial expansion, its very logic entailed the relegation of
that enterprise to the margins. In Renaissance literature as
a whole, Europe's outward thrust is often unrepresented but indirectly
influential, especially in encouraging a new breadth of outlook.14 Here, however, it is
not just unrepresented but also unrepresentable and hence deeply,
if negatively, formative.
8. Such a perspective accords well
with Part One of Don Quijote, which seems to share a characteristic
disillusionment (Spanish "desengaño") with much
late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth century writing -- including
but hardly limited to works by Montaigne, Shakespeare, and Quevedo.
That disillusionment seems related in part to the fading of the
initial enthusiasm over discovery, trade, and conquest. But since
Part Two of Don Quijote to some extent overturns the premises
of Part One, shifting sympathy to Don Quijote and away from the
people who toy with him, it can far less easily constitute a
critique of Spanish imperialism in the New World, even an allegorical
one. As the work undermines its own premises, it might almost
be considered a critique of the critique of empire. Hence, Part
Two is compatible with the reading of Don Quijote that
emphasizes the nostalgia for feudalism beneath the superficial
denunciation of chivalric romance. In other words, the apparent
dispute between the anti-imperial and the imperial interpretations
described above may be remapped into locally valid accounts of
Part One and Part Two respectively. But given not only the ideologically
self-contradictory character of Part Two but also the overarching
formal logic of the work as a whole, in which the unprecedented
reconstruction of everyday reality paradoxically calls into question
the existence of that very reality, it is probably more prudent
to refrain from direct ideological translation in favor of recognizing
the skeptical corrosive spirit that Part Two heightens through
its intensified self-reflexive turn. This is one sense in which
Don Quijote is and is not about America.
9. Though the Islamic material
in the novel can be subjected to the same general line of argument,
its far greater prominence encourages more extended treatment.
This material appears in a number of registers in the novel.
A range of passing references -- especially to the Moorish legacy
or the contemporary Turkish threat -- implicitly indicate the
everyday impact of Muslim civilization on Spain. Perhaps the
most striking, and certainly the most pedantic, of these references
concerns linguistic borrowing. As Don Quijote explains to Sancho,
"este nombre albogues es morisco, como lo son todos
aquellos que en nuestra lengua castellana comienzan en al
. . . . Alhelí y alfaquí, tanto por
el al primero como por el i en que acaban, son
conocidos por arábigos." ("The name albogues
comes from Arabic, like all the words in Spanish that start with
al . . . . The words alhelí [gillyflower,
carnation] and alfaquí can be seen to be from the
Arabic, as much because of the al at the beginning as
the i at the end.")15
The literary and historical allusions, however, usually
have a more romantic, even exotic feel. They blend into the evocation
by Don Quijote of the imaginary Moors of chivalric romance, who
in turn give rise to the fabricated ones with which the Duke
and Duchess amuse themselves at Quijote and Sancho's expense
in Part Two. Third, Cervantes handles a potentially grim side
of the subject with an exceptionally light touch. The Inquisition
is redeployed above all in the burning of Don Quijote's library
by the priest. Here Cervantes combines opposition to books of
chivalry with detailed literary critical evaluation, a cheerful
tone throughout, and an introductory summary judgment, in which
annihilation by bonfire becomes "la muerte de aquellos inocentes"
(I:6, p. 67; "the death of these innocents," I:6, p.
35) -- a phrase that turns the language of the Catholic Church
against itself. The Inquisition bears a family resemblance to
Sancho's assertion of Old Christian (religiously impeccable)
blood, typical of the peasantry and directed against the taint
of Islam as well as of Judaism. Only the absence of records,
which would have revealed the high percentage of the Spanish
rural lower class who converted from Christianity during the
centuries of Muslim rule, allowed such claims to stand. In Don
Quijote, Sancho's pride in his ancestry characteristically
contributes a comic effect, except in the episode of Ricote.
10. The background to that episode
is the fate of the moriscos, whose expulsion, mentioned
earlier, falls between the publication of Parts One and Two of
Don Quijote. A former neighbor of Sancho's, Ricote returns
to Spain illegally, in disguise, and in secret to retrieve some
buried treasure and by that means to have the wherewithal to
effect a rendezvous in Germany with his wife and daughter, loyal
Christians who have emigrated to Algeria. Sancho's friendship
assures his silence; his scruples, however, cause him to reject
Ricote's request for assistance. Here we seem to confront directly
an important issue of daily life in early seventeenth-century
Spain and hence a fit subject for the realist dimension of Don
Quijote. And protected by an orthodox defense of the expulsion
from Ricote's own mouth, Cervantes finds in ethnic cleansing
what is for Don Quijote an uncharacteristic moment of
pathos, again in Ricote's words: "es el deseo tan grande
que casi todos tenemos de volver a España, que los más
de aquellos, y son muchos, que saben la lengua como yo, se vuelven
a ella, y dejan allá a sus mujeres y sus hijos desamparados:
tanto es el amor que la tienen; y agora conozco y experimento
lo que suele decirse; que es dulce el amor de la patria"
(II:54, pp. 932-33; "virtually every one of us has such
a burning desire to return to Spain that those among us who know
the language as I do -- and there are many, many who do -- in
fact make our way back, abandoning our wives and children in
all those other places, for that is how intensely we love Spain,
and now, indeed, I know and have experienced the common saying:
The love of your country is sweet," II:54, p. 647). As if
to emphasize the point, Cervantes repeats it in a comic mode
only a few pages later, having Sancho and his donkey fall into
a pit, where the man laments to his animal: "miserables
de nosotros, que no ha querido nuestra corta suerte que muriésemos
en nuestra patria y entre los nuestros, donde ya que no hallara
remedio nuestra desgracia, no faltara quien dello se doliera,
y en la hora última de nuestro pasamiento nos cerrara
los ojos!" (II:55, p. 937; "how miserable we are, prevented
by our cruel destiny from dying in our own country, surrounded
by our own people, because even if they couldn't find a way of
helping us, there would at least have been people to mourn over
us, and to close our eyes at the last moment, when we left this
earth!" II:55, p. 651).
11. But this is one of those exceptions
that proves the rule of the unrepresentability of empire noted
earlier. Ricote enters Don Quijote only when and because
he is no longer allowed to enter Spain, when the moriscos
are not merely a marginal but actually a dispersed, exiled, and
superseded sector of the Spanish population, important primarily
in their absence, evoked primarily in the mode of elegy. Second,
the logic of his story -- really a throwback to the inset novellas
of Part One -- is that of romance. The buried treasure is an
early hint. Another is the brief reference to a stereotypical
morisco romance, the unresolved love plot between Ricote's
beautiful and orthodox Christian daughter, Ana Félix,
and an Old Christian suitor. When Don Quijote and Sancho later
reach the Mediterranean coast at Barcelona, they witness the
capture of an Algerian pirate brig, which turns out to be captained
by Ana Félix, disguised as a man. She has temporarily
left her suitor behind in Algeria, where he is disguised as a
woman; is recognized by and reunited with her father, who providentially
shows up at the right moment laden with gold; is pardoned and
indeed treated royally by Barcelona's officials; and in short
order is reunited with her lover as well, who is rescued from
Barbary. The episode ends with efforts underway, though of uncertain
outcome, to obtain an exception for Ricote and his daughter that
will allow them to remain in Spain. The stagy theatricality of
these events, the double cross-dressing combined with an open
reference to a homosexuality taken to be characteristic of the
Islamic court (and, as some critics have surmised, perhaps a
part of Cervantes's own experience in captivity),16 the perilous sea adventures, the near-death
experiences, the reconciliation of father and daughter and of
boy and girl -- all these are the stuff of romance and thus are
incompatible with the main thrust of the novel.17
12. Similar considerations apply
to the earlier Captive's Tale. Here too events seem to conspire
in encouraging a realistic rendering of the imperial foe, and
to a considerable extent Cervantes delivers on this promise.
Whether or not the tale is autobiographical, Cervantes certainly
draws on his own Algerian imprisonment to provide a credible
account of life in captivity. This portrayal memorably extends
to Muslim culture in a passage that anticipates Ricote's lament
for his lost Spanish homeland. The Captive owes his escape to
Zoraida, a beautiful Moorish woman who will become his Christian
bride in Spain. Her wealthy father is briefly kidnaped as part
of their flight. When he is set free, he curses both the Christians
and his daughter. But as they sail away, they hear him cry: "Vuelve,
amada hija, vuelve a tierra, que todo te lo perdono; entrega
a esos hombres ese dinero, que ya es suyo, y vuelve a consolar
a este triste padre tuyo, que en esta desierta arena dejará
la vida, si tú le dejas!" (I:41, p. 427; "Come
back, oh my beloved daughter, come back, I forgive everything!
Let those men have all this money, it's already theirs, and come
back to comfort your miserable father, who will die here in these
barren sands, if you abandon him!" I:41, p. 287.) The intensity
of the moment arguably exceeds that of Ricote's remarks published
a decade later and is perhaps equaled only by Don Quijote's dying
words.
13. For all the verisimilitude
of Cervantes's portrayal, however, the Captive's Tale remains
atypical of Don Quijote in at least three ways. First,
it arises less logically and more metonymically than most of
the episodes even of Part One, though the Tale of Impertinent
Curiosity is a still more extreme example. The Algerian excursus
is in short an inset novella rather than an integral part of
the main plot. Though it may reflect implicitly on Quijote and
Sancho, it has almost nothing to do with them directly other
than the fact that they are there to hear it. Second, its realism
lacks the demystifying thrust of so many of the protagonists'
adventures. Finally and relatedly, its internal structure is
that of morisco romance -- the persistence of exotic elements,
the Moorish woman who converts to Christianity, the lovers brought
together after great peril, the family reunion that succeeds
almost immediately thereafter, the vast sums of money that shower
down on the happy couple, the remarkable coincidences indicative
of the benevolent hand of Providence.18 In Don Quijote, then, realism is incompatible
not only with the representation of the non-European world but
also with affective power except, perhaps, briefly at the end.
It was left to later writers to retrieve the emotional force
of earlier literature for the novel form.
14. If Don Quijote tends
to relegate things Islamic to the incidental, historical, anachronistic,
fantastic, excluded, external, exotic, and romantic, however,
the narrative voice of Cide Hamete Benengeli gives one pause.
He may have been an afterthought. The opening paragraph of Part
One explains: "Quieren decir que tenía el sobrenombre
de Quijada, o Quesada, que en esto hay alguna diferencia en los
autores que deste caso escriben; aunque por conjeturas verosímiles
se deja entender que se llamaba Quejana." (I:1, p. 36; "It's
said his family name was Quijada or maybe Quesada: there's some
disagreement among the writers who've discussed the matter. But
more than likely his name was really Quejana," I:1, p. 13.)
Shortly thereafter, however, we're told that the hero's decision
to call himself Don Quijote persuades "los autores desta
tan verdadera historia que, sin duda, se debía llamar
Quijada, y no Quesada, como otros quisieron decir" (I:1,
p. 40 ; "the authors of this highly veracious history that,
beyond any question, his family name must have been Quijada,
rather than Quesada, as others have claimed," I:1, p. 16).
In conjunction with the undermining of authorial authority, these
passages evoke multiple biographers. The introduction of Cide
Hamete Benengeli in Chapter Nine by contrast narrows the field
to one, though the mediating morisco translator and first-person
narrator exercise editorial prerogative. If Cervantes did indeed
invent Cide on the fly, this is of a piece with the generally
improvised feel of Part One and may help account as well for
the relatively limited use to which the Moorish historian is
put in the 1605 version, after his spectacular initial appearance
to continue the interrupted saga of Don Quijote's battle with
the Basque page (I:9).
15. That appearance, however, follows
hard upon the introduction of Sancho Panza, which may well have
had decisive formal consequences in transforming a novella devoted
to a monomaniacal obsession into a dialogical interaction of
verbal, ideological, and social range -- in short, into a novel.
Can something similar be said for the Muslim historian and in
particular for his religion and ethnicity? The text does not
at first encourage this line of thought. The first-person narrator
worries about getting the truth from an "arábigo,
siendo muy propio de los de aquella nación ser mentirosos"
(I:9, p. 95; "Arab, since it's very natural for people of
that race to be liars," I:9, p. 52) -- an anxiety shared
by Don Quijote himself in Part Two, since "de los moros
no se podía esperar verdad alguna, porque todos son embelecadores,
falsarios y quimeristas" (II:3, p. 558; "truth simply
could not be expected from the Moors, because they were all cheaters,
swindlers, and wild-eyed troublemakers," II:3, p. 374).
Yet most of the evidence points unequivocally in the opposite
direction. The nearly simultaneous eruption of Sancho Panza and
Cide Hamete Benengeli into the work implies a double effort at
social exteriority -- one based on class, the other on religion
-- as if Cervantes were seeking a stance outside the norms of
the dominant culture. Since the doctrinal difference pertains
to the first author himself, as Cervantes calls him, it is also
entangled with what might be deemed an epistemological exteriority
-- the laborious construction and then interrogation of objective
reality. All of this, it can be surmised, is part of the estrangement
effect attendant upon the elevation of everyday life to artistic
seriousness. In other words, the importance of Cide Hamete Benengeli
lies less in the specific content of any putative Islamic identity
than in its marked distance from Christian Spain. That distance,
moreover, though not bereft of ideological implications, translates
primarily into formal originality. Thus, rather than deciphering
the ideology of form, we need to understand the form of ideology.
The issue is less the religious implications of genre than the
generic implications of religion.19
16. Part Two exploits the opportunities
created by an Islamic narrator far more fully than does Part
One, just as is the case with Sancho Panza. Like Sancho's, Cide
Hamete's increased importance follows from the altered narrative
logic of Part Two. In the case of Cide, the very literariness
attributed to Part One by Part Two calls attention to the act
of telling. Many of the references to the original author either
by name or in his capacity as author are relatively innocuous
reminders of his existence or of his veracity. But others go
beyond that. They range from rhetorical set pieces (II:17, p.
657; II:17, p. 446), through disabused disquisitions on poverty
with a sly glance at Cervantes's own financial straits (II:44,
pp. 852-53, and II:48, p. 882; II:44, pp. 589-90, and II:48,
p. 610), to evaluative judgments on wisdom and folly, sanity
and madness: "Y dice más Cide Hamete: que tiene para
sí ser tan locos los burladores como los burlados, y que
no estaban los duques dos dedos de parecer tontos, pues tanto
ahínco ponían en burlarse de los tontos."
(II:70, p. 1041; "Sidi Hamid also records that, in his opinion,
those who concocted the joke were quite as crazy as those who
were obliged to experience it, and that in working so hard to
make fun of fools, the duke and duchess had come within an inch
of looking like fools themselves," II:70, p. 726.) Most
important, a considerable number of passages are self-reflexively
narratological. The inset novellas of Part One are defended in
Part One (Ch. 28) and more critically canvassed by Sancho, Quijote,
and Sansón Carrasco early in Part Two (Ch. 3). The omission
of such novellas from Part Two inspires Hamete Benengeli's "queja
. . . de sí mismo" (II:44, p. 848 ; "complaint
against himself," II:44, p. 586), which ends with the request
that readers "se le den alabanzas, no por lo que escribe,
sino por lo que ha dejado de escribir" (II:44, p. 849; "praise
him, not so much for what he has written, as for what he has
refrained from writing," II:44, p. 586). Indeed, Cide or
his translator or the narrator often comments on the refusal
to digress (II:12, p. 619, and II:18, p. 662; II:12, pp. 418,
419, and II:18, p. 450). They also question the plausibility
of certain episodes, usually consigning them to apocryphal status
(Spanish -- II:5, pp. 570, 573, 575; II:10, p. 601; II:23, p.
702; II:24, p. 713; English -- II: 5, pp. 383, 386, 387; II:10,
p. 406; II:23, p. 479; II:24, p. 487). The translator or narrator
points out Benengeli's imprecision about this or that fact (Spanish
-- II:10, p. 604; II:18, p. 663; II:60, p. 972; II:68, p. 1032;
II:74, p. 1067; English -- II:10, p. 408; II:18, p. 451; II:60,
p. 676; II:68, p. 719; II:74, p. 745). But the narrator also
emphasizes the primary author's commitment to accuracy (Spanish
-- II:40, p. 822; II:47, p. 878; English -- II:40, p. 566; II:47,
p. 608). All of this of course has the effect of calling the
possibility of such accuracy into question.
17. As such, it feeds into Cervantes's
playful handling of religion: "Bendito sea el poderoso Alá!
-- dice Hamete Benengeli" (II:8, p. 589; "'Blessed
be Allah the All-Mighty!' says Hamid Benengeli," II:8, p.
397). The original author invokes his religion's prophet: "por
Mahoma" (II:48, p. 882; " in the name of Mohammed,"
II:48, p. 610); and he is called a "filósofo mahomético"
(II:53, p. 923; "Muhammadan philosopher," II:53, p.
640) when he presents an ambiguous comparison between the instability
of life and the North African cycle of five seasons. Or, more
teasingly: "Entra Cide Hamete, coronista desta grande historia,
con estas palabras en este capítulo: 'Juro como católico
cristiano . . .'; a lo que su traductor dice que el jurar Cide
Hamete como católico cristiano siendo él moro,
como sin duda lo era, no quiso decir otra cosa sino que así
como el católico cristiano cuando jura, jura, o debe jurar,
verdad, y decirla en lo que dijere, así él la decía,
como si jurara como cristiano católico" (II:27, p.
738; "Sidi Hamid, this great history's chronicler, begins
this chapter with the following declaration: 'I swear as a Catholic
Christian . . .,' to which the translator adds that when Sidi
Hamid swore as a Catholic Christian, being as he surely was a
Moor, all he meant was that he was swearing in precisely the
way that a Catholic Christian would swear, or is supposed to
swear, that he is being truthful in saying whatever he says,
just as Sidi Hamid, swearing as a Catholic Christian, was verifying
his own truthfulness," II:27, pp. 504-05). Similarly: "exclamó
Benengeli . . . : 'Oh pobreza, pobreza! . . . Yo, aunque moro,
bien sé, por la comunicación que he tenido con
cristianos, que la santidad consiste en la caridad, humildad,
fee, obediencia y pobreza'" (II:44, pp. 852-53; "Benengeli
exclaimed, . . . 'Oh poverty, poverty! . . . For even I, though
a Moor, can readily perceive [having been in contact with many
Christians] that holiness is composed of charity, humility, faith,
obedience, and poverty,'" II:44, p. 589). I hypothesized
earlier that Cide Hamete's religion and ethnicity served primarily
formal rather than ideological ends. But only primarily. These
passages simultaneously undermine both literary and doctrinal
epistemological certainty.
18. The final twist on the strategy
is effected by the introduction -- again perhaps improvisational
-- of the pseudonymous Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda's
continuation of Don Quijote (1614) into the Prologue and,
more vertiginously, into the latter stages of Cervantes's own
Part Two. This move only exacerbates the literally impossible
self-referentiality from which Cervantes obtains so much leverage.
Part One was published in 1605 and refers to Don Quijote's death.
But Part Two must take place after the publication of Part One
-- since the characters of Part Two discuss that publication
-- and in it Don Quijote is still very much alive. Avellaneda's
version, which appeared in 1614, therefore extends the protagonist's
life span still farther, whereas in Cervantes's own narrative
the events of Part Two occur very shortly after those of Part
One. The intrusion of these extra-textual facts is thus strictly
speaking incompatible with the work's internal time-scheme. But
who cares? The incorporation of Avellaneda's Don Quijote
sets up a running contrast between the lying Christian's fiction
(Avellaneda may have been a cleric)20 and the truthful Muslim's history. As Sancho
explains: "el Sancho y el don Quijote desa historia deben
de ser otros que los que andan en aquella que compuso Cide Hamete
Benengeli, que somos nosotros." ("The Sancho and the
Don Quijote in that book have got to be different people from
the ones in Sidi Hamid Benengeli's book, because the ones in
his book are us.") To which the corroborating reply
is: "se había de mandar que ninguno fuera osado a
tratar de las cosas del gran don Quijote, si no fuese Cide Hamete
su primer autor." (II:59, p. 970; "it ought to be made
illegal for anyone but Sidi Hamid, the original author, to write
about the great Don Quijote and his doings," II:59, p. 674.)
In Barcelona, welcome is extended to Don Quijote -- "no
el falso, no el ficticio, no el apócrifo que en falsas
historias estos días nos han mostrado, sino el verdadero,
el legal y el fiel que nos describió Cide Hamete Benengeli,
flor de los historiadores" (II:61, p. 987; "not the
counterfeit, not the false and fictive, the apocryphal Don Quijote,
brought before us, recently, by lying histories, but the true,
the lawful, and the real Don Quijote drawn for us by Sidi Hamid
Benengeli, flower of all historians," II:61, p. 686). In
a mock-vision of hell conjured up by a servant of the Duke and
Duchess -- a passage that establishes a disquieting and possibly
unintended resonance with the burning of Don Quijote's library
-- the devils play ball with bad books, in the process destroying
them. "Mirad qué libro es ése" ("Hey,
what book is that?"), one asks. "Ésta es la
segunda parte de la historia de don Quijote de la Mancha, no
compuesta por Cide Hamete, su primer autor, sino por un aragonés,
que él dice ser natural de Tordesillas." (II:70,
p. 1043; "That's the so-called second part of Don Quijote
de La Mancha's history, not written by Sidi Hamid, the original
author, but by some Aragonese fellow who's supposed to come from
Tordesillas," II:70, p. 727.) And on the hero's death bed,
efforts are taken "para quitar la ocasión de algún
otro autor que Cide Hamete Benengeli le resucitase falsamente"
(II:74, p. 1067; "to prevent any writer other than Sidi
Hamid Benengeli from falsely resurrecting Don Quijote,"
II:74, p. 745).
19. In short, Cervantes has it
both ways. At one level the deployment of Cide Hamete undermines
narrative and religious authority. At another, the concern with
dishonest Arabs has been left far behind. In comparison with
the lying Christian interloper, the truthful Muslim author retains
absolute authority.21
We might speculate that the expulsion of the moriscos pushed
Cervantes in the direction of this doubly, if inconsistently,
critical move, beneath the scrupulously maintained veneer of
orthodoxy. The novel concludes with Cide Hamete getting the last
word, an address to his pen: "Para mí sola nació
don Quijote, y yo para él; . . . solos los dos somos para
en uno, a despecho y pesar del escritor fingido y tordesillesco
. . . . pues no ha sido otro mi deseo que poner en aborrecimiento
de los hombres las fingidas y disparatadas historias de los libros
de caballerías" (II:74, p. 1068; "Don Quijote
was born only for me, as I for him; . . . only we two are a unity,
in spite of that fake Tordesillan scribbler . . . . for all I
ever wanted was to make men loathe the concocted, wild-eyed stories
told as tales of chivalry," II:74, p. 746). Thus this passage
unites Benengeli not only with Don Quijote but also with the
author of the Prologue to Part One, who is not quite Cervantes
but is certainly a less mediated version of him than is Cide
Hamete or the morisco translator. The friend of this author
-- though, perhaps significantly, not the author himself -- asserts
that "todo él es una invectiva contra los libros
de caballerías" (p. 24; "the whole thing is
an attack on romantic tales of chivalry," p. 10). More than
the inset tales of Moors and moriscos, then, and in a
fashion that overlaps to an extent with the role of Sancho Panza,
Cide Hamete Benengeli is integral to both the skeptical and critical
dimensions of Don Quijote. Arguably he contributes to
an inchoate reconstructive impulse as well. For if Part Two in
particular at times seems to regret the irrelevance (at best)
of the chivalric temper to the national culture, perhaps an alternative
is a more encompassing vision of that culture.
20. It is difficult to determine
the precise weight of the specifically Arabic, Moorish, and Islamic
side of Cide Hamete, as distinguished from the more deracinated
and narrowly formal significance of multiple, self-conscious
author-historians. The separation is probably artificial. What
is likely, however, is that the Muslim world enters Don Quijote
most profoundly at the level not of representation but of narration.
Given the specific form of Cervantes's novel, it could not have
been otherwise.
21. To what extent can one extrapolate
from a single case? To address this question, we can look both
back and forward. Don Quijote is sometimes seen as the
synthesis of picaresque and chivalric romance. Although the picaresque
at first carries a distinctively intra-national charge, Mateo
Alemán's important Guzmán de Alfarache (1599,
1604) sends its protagonist, by now a convicted criminal, to
row in the galleys. More important, chivalric romance seems inconceivable
without reference to the relationship between Christianity and
Islam in the Mediterranean. This is so whether the focus is on
the early vernacular texts of the twelfth century as responses
to the Crusades, the more overt treatment of the subject in Wolfram
von Eschenbach's early thirteenth-century Parzival, or
works composed in the shadow of the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople
in 1453 and spared burning by Don Quijote's priest -- Martorell's
late fifteenth-century Tirant lo Blanc and Ariosto's Orlando
Furioso. Similarly, Cervantes's debt to ancient Greek romance
brings with it (pre-Islamic) north Africa.
22. Yet none of these forms provides
as crucial a constructional model for Cervantes in general and
Don Quijote in particular as does the novella, which achieves
high artistic status in Boccaccio's Decameron in the mid-fourteenth
century. The Exemplary Novellas, some of which predate
the first part of Don Quijote, are by the author's own
account the first such collection in Spanish. Don Quijote
itself may well have begun as yet another novella before, perhaps
with the introduction of Sancho Panza and, shortly thereafter,
of Cide Hamete, Cervantes discovered the possibilities of extended
narrative. Further, the episodic quality of Part One in particular
resembles a collection of novellas in which the protagonists
remain constant. Finally, the inset novellas, which individually
recall the tales collected in the Exemplary Novellas,
slightly alter this method by introducing a different set of
protagonists, while reducing Don Quijote and Sancho to auditors.
In this way, Don Quijote approaches the method of the
frame-tale collection, the macrostructural principle of The
Decameron, here with Don Quijote and Sancho serving as the
frame. Boccaccio, of course, does not spring from nowhere. There
are precedents for the novella in Italian and for both the novella
and the frame-tale collection in medieval Latin. But behind all
of these lie earlier sources and analogues in Arabic, of which
the best-known today is the Thousand-and-One Nights. These
enter European literature via Latin or vernacular -- especially
Spanish -- translation. The Arabic materials in turn draw on
Persian and ultimately Indian models. In short, the origins of
what is arguably the quintessential European form lie in north
Africa and southwestern and south Asia.22
23. European fiction of the
late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries apparently continues
this multicontinental perspective. Behn's Oroonoko, Defoe's
Captain Singleton and Robinson Crusoe, Swift's
Gulliver's Travels, Montesquieu's Persian Letters,
Johnson's Rasselas, and Voltaire's Candide all
crucially depend on the non-European world for their plot, outlook,
or both. Of these works, however, only Defoe's, indebted as they
are to the picaresque, are unambiguously novels, and even they
formally differ from the shaped realist narratives that become
the staple of the European novel.23 Those narratives usually descend directly or
indirectly from either the Exemplary Novellas or Don
Quijote. But in some of the leading specimens -- Lafayette's
Princess of Clèves, Richardson's Pamela
and Clarissa, Fielding's Joseph Andrews and Tom
Jones, Laclos's Dangerous Liaisons, and even a somewhat
eccentric work like Sterne's Tristram Shandy -- the intercontinental
referent has all but disappeared. As suggested earlier, one of
the necessary projects of the novel after Cervantes was to jettison
even Don Quijote's limited extra-European perspective,
an epistemological and ideological transmutation somewhat paralleled
by the only partial simultaneous subordination of popular culture
but certainly issuing in both the constriction and the expansion
of the novel. Realism requires the near-exclusion of self-reflexive
strategies and exotic peoples alike, both of which might undermine
its claim to reality.
24. Before pursuing this hypothesis
in relation to the nineteenth-century fiction, we can gain an
external vantage point by turning briefly to Romantic poetry.
A representation of empire or of non-European peoples is routine
in lyric and narrative alike. Goethe, arguably not a Romantic,
models his collection The West-Eastern Divan on the fourteenth-century
Persian poet Hafiz. Leopardi begins his career with anti-imperialist
nationalist works in reaction to Napoleonic power, moves to a
level of philosophical abstraction in the "Night Song of
a Nomadic Shepherd in Asia," and ends with his celebrated
"Broom or the Flower of the Desert," a poem whose metaphysical
cast nonetheless is indebted to the international, indeed intercontinental
purview of his earlier writing. Byron provides the obvious example
of the easy crossing of European borders in Romantic poetry through
his repeated rendering of the eastern Mediterranean in Childe
Harold, in parts of Don Juan, and in Oriental tales
such as The Giaour.24
Hugo's lyric collection Orientalia is indebted to Byron,
as are some of Pushkin's early poems like The Fountain of
Bakhchisaray, which in turn influences Mickiewicz's Crimean
Sonnets. But Pushkin and Mickiewicz, who had been friends,
fell out over Russia's imperial suppression of Polish nationalism,
which Pushkin aggressively defended. Mickiewicz bitterly counterattacked
in Forefather's Eve, Part III, an extended verse narrative
that denounces Petersburg as a symbol of Russian aggression.
Pushkin replied in what is arguably his finest work, The Bronze
Horseman, a poem that ostensibly celebrates Peter the Great
and Petersburg alike but also internalizes and implicitly accepts
Mickiewicz's critique.
25. The moral of these examples,
which could easily be multiplied and extended to later nineteenth-century
poetry,25 is not that
Romanticism is fundamentally Orientalist, imperialist, anti-imperialist,
or even merely interested in other continents. It is rather that
a significant area of compatibility exists between the characteristic
concerns of Romanticism and the representation of non-European
culture. Think of the routine clichés -- emphasis on the
imagination at the expense of dead fact, turn from prose to poetry,
privileging of the lyric and meditative over the narrative, fascination
with the unique and abnormal and exotic as opposed to general
nature, return to the medieval and the Gothic in reaction to
an emergent modernity, preference for the rural over the urban,
interest in primitivism at the expense of civilization, rejection
of inherited truths in favor of a revolution in thought and life
and maybe even society. Few of these tendencies point you away
from a concern with the non-Western world; some seem positively
to invite such consideration. In short, the world was discursively
available to Romantic poetry.
26. It is otherwise with nineteenth-century
realist fiction. Indeed, one can demonstrate an inverse relationship
between the realist novel and the representation of empire at
the very moment Europe initiates a second wave of global expansion,
three centuries after the conquest of America. Stendhal's Red
and the Black, Balzac's Père Goriot or Lost
Illusions, Flaubert's Madame Bovary or Sentimental
Education, Gogol's Dead Souls, Turgenev's Fathers
and Sons, Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, the major works
of Dostoyevsky -- these novels have next-to-nothing to say about
Africa, Asia, or the Americas, imperial or otherwise, and not
that much more about even other European nations. They are in
this sense implicit evidence of the national and nationalist
vocation of the realist novel. The same holds for a wide variety
of equally prominent British fiction of the era. But as one might
expect from the leading imperial power, there is another group
of English novels that can be and often are cited to demonstrate
the close connection between the realist novel and European imperialism
-- Austen's Mansfield Park, Charlotte Brontë's Jane
Eyre, Thackeray's Vanity Fair, Dickens' Great Expectations
and Bleak House, and George Eliot's Daniel Deronda.
27. These are, however, the exceptions
that prove the rule. The works by Austen, Brontë, Thackeray,
and Dickens offer colonial or imperial backdrops of varying importance
for the plot. Recent criticism has gone to considerable lengths
to demonstrate the significance of the Caribbean, or India, or
Australia to these novels -- precisely what one does not have
to do (and this is a crucial point) to prove, for instance, that
Jane Eyre or Great Expectations is a Bildungsroman.26 In other words, the
very effort and ingenuity that goes into establishing the imperial
connection tells its own unwitting story, though the task becomes
easier when one moves away from high canonical realism. As we
would expect, the colonial backdrops themselves are frequently
referred to but scarcely represented.27 A similar argument, though with a twist, applies
to Daniel Deronda. The novel is able to depict a non-European
people (Jews) because those people live inside European society.
The work moves toward Zionism, which can arguably be understood
as a distinctive species of European expansion. But characteristically
it cannot actually represent the implementation of the Zionist
project because that would take it outside the confines of Europe
and of the European realist novel.
28. Like Daniel Deronda,
Scott's Ivanhoe presents a Jewish character within English
society. Unlike Eliot's work, Ivanhoe is a historical
novel; as such, though it is in the realist mode, it has greater
representational freedom -- precisely because it is set in the
past. Though, like Daniel Deronda, it does not venture
beyond the confines of Europe, elsewhere Scott combines geographical
and historical distance.28
The same pairing also characterizes Flaubert's Salammbô
and in a way Cooper's Last of the Mohicans as well.
Temporal distance enables geographical or ethnic range, while
nonetheless facilitating implicit commentary on the contemporary
scene.29 But the connection
is possible rather than necessary: Trafalgar, the first
in Galdós's long series of historical novels, and, of
course, Tolstoy's War and Peace limit their investigations
of empire to an intra-European "take" on the Napoleonic
Wars. Not surprisingly, Chateaubriand's earlier, more fanciful,
and pseudo-historical short novel Atala has certain limited
affinities not only with the exotic elements in Cooper and Flaubert
but also with Romantic poetry, as do the openly Orientalist sections
of Dumas's Count of Monte Cristo. From the Romantic it
is scarcely a step to the supernatural. Stoker's Dracula employs
a realist mode, but does so in order to render the threat of
vampires. This flight from standard realism into what Patrick
Brantlinger has called the late-Victorian "imperial Gothic"30 allows a brief visit
to an only nominally European Transylvania, understood as an
alien invasive threat to England and humanity at the very high
point of British overseas imperialism. In short, the realist
novel has enormous difficulty directly representing the contemporary
European confrontation with the non-European world.
29. The far-flung empire of the
West is, however, the overt topic of Conrad's Heart of Darkness
as well as other of his works such as Nostromo. Though
Conrad's focus on non-English imperialism raises ideological
issues, from the formalist perspective adopted here his fiction
leads one to ask whether modernism escapes the limitations of
realism. Gide's contemporaneous Immoralist provokes the
same question. The answer, however, would seem to be that it
does not. Kipling's Kim has no difficulty in representing
a distant empire in a realist vein; similarly, Stevenson moves
from the Romantic adventure of Treasure Island to a more
realistic mode after he actually settles in Polynesia. The shift
is paradigmatic. What these works share is a historical moment,
the moment when the European settler colonies have acquired sufficient
density to allow for realist representation.31 In this respect, modernism does not constitute
a break with realism.
30. Such a conclusion therefore
opens the possibility of a realist fiction that is not limited
to the West, provided that the geographical distances are not
so daunting. We might look to the two great terrestrial empires
of the nineteenth century, the North American and the Russian,
for instances of the necessary contiguity. The examples from
the United States all come with caveats. Cooper's fiction is
set in the past. Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin and, to strain
even further, Twain's Huckleberry Finn portray African
Americans, a people who, despite their ancestry, are far more
internal to American society than are Cooper's historically distant
and culturally "other" Indians. With Melville, who,
like Conrad after him, exploits the opportunities of a maritime
career in his fiction, the limitations are slightly different.
An early South Seas tale such as Typee certainly renders
an alien culture but hardly does so in a realistic mode. The
heritage of Romanticism and of romance also pervades Moby-Dick,
which, as in Leopardi's late poetry, raises earlier international
-- in this instance anti-ethnocentric -- concerns to a philosophical
plane, at the same time that its minute rendering of whaling
life does not really deliver a realist narrative because that
rendering remains largely unintegrated into what little plot
there is.32 Perhaps
Benito Cereno comes closer in its deceptively bland version
of a shipboard slave rebellion, though like The Last of the
Mohicans it addresses contemporary racial concerns by recourse
to events well in the past, and like Heart of Darkness
it develops a highly ambiguous, perhaps ambivalent, account of
its own country's complicity in European imperialism.
31. In Russia, many of the leading
novelists were at pains to portray the internal alien cultures
of Tsarist Russia. Pushkin, whose unfinished tale "The Moor
of Peter the Great" treats his own Ethiopian ancestor, composed,
but later rejected, a trip to the Caucusus for the eponymous
hero of Eugene Onegin, his "novel in verse."
That is also the destination of Lermontov's titular protagonist
in A Hero of Our Time. The Cossacks form the subject of
Gogol's Taras Bulba and of Tolstoy's Cossacks and
other earlier tales. Tolstoy's late short novel, Hadji Murad,
concerns the Crimean Tartars. The conclusion of many of these
works -- that the gap between the cultures of Russia and the
Caucasus is unbridgeable -- helps explain two phenomena. First,
the problem of integration today between Russia and Chechnya
involves the ethnic and geographical descendants, as it were,
of these fictional characters. Second, Pushkin ultimately decided
not to include his Caucasian material, and the most esteemed
Russian novels of subsequent decades, often by the same writers
who depicted Cossacks and Tartars, concentrated instead on Russian
society more narrowly conceived.
32. Fiction from the United States
and Russia, then, suggests that even geographical proximity has
only limited value in overcoming the barriers erected by realist
norms to the representation of non-European cultures. In the
four centuries after Columbus, the literature of empire in the
West composed in a realist vein fundamentally obeys the logic
of nonrepresentation. There is another way of looking at the
matter, however, in which the geographically marginal position
of these two countries with respect to the core of European high
culture places them on the receiving end of imperialism. Supporting
evidence can be adduced from the United States; the case seems
to me both stronger and more suggestive for Russia, however.
As already implied, War and Peace fits well with this
interpretation. Though contemporaneous with Tolstoy's novel,
Dostoyevsky's major works -- Notes from Underground, Crime
and Punishment, Demons (formerly translated as The
Possessed), The Idiot, and The Brothers Karamazov
-- seem to belong to another world. These novels expose the self-destructiveness
of living by Western ideals of reason, science, liberalism, and
revolution in a Russia more appropriately guided by the political
norms of the Tsarist state and the religious values of the Orthodox
Church, both understood in some sense as fundamentally non-Western.33 For most readers, Dostoyevsky's
critique proves far more compelling than his traditionalist alternative.
Its persuasiveness arises not from the author's simple opposition
to modernity, however, but on the contrary from his internalization
of its attractions. Something similar might be said of Tolstoy.
This dual access to the most advanced ideas of the West and the
older values of the national culture may help explain the extraordinary
emergence of nineteenth century Russian literature and in particular
the remarkable, enduring reputations of Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy.
33. In this respect, Russia conforms
to a striking pattern in modern European literature. After 600
years in which literary leadership tended to be aligned with
political and military power, aesthetic innovation seems to have
shifted to the margins beginning in the mid-eighteenth century.
One thinks of the Scottish Enlightenment, Germany in the age
of Goethe, the American Renaissance especially in New England,
Russia as already suggested, Scandinavia at the end of the nineteenth
century, Ireland at the beginning of the twentieth, Jewish writers
in the era of high modernism, the American South of Faulkner
and his successors, and, after World War Two, the rest of the
world -- Latin America, Africa, Eastern Europe, India, East Asia,
and Oceania, often in European languages, often via the novel
form. In other words, the comparative advantage has resided with
those who were both inside and outside the center of European
modernity. Assessment of the consequences of this phenomenon
lies beyond the scope of the present paper. Two points may be
hazarded in conclusion, however. First, though it would be wrong
retrospectively to baptize nineteenth-century Russia a Third
World country avant la lettre (a concept like the semi-periphery
might make more sense), it may be useful to construct a lineage
that partly links its literary practice to those of post-colonial
societies. Second, and more closely related to the concerns developed
above, the example of Russia suggests a final way of thinking
about the capacities of novelistic realism. When deployed in
the metropole, the realist novel cuts against the representation
of non-European culture or the interaction between the European
and non-European worlds. No such limitations obtain, however,
when the realist mode is deployed at the fringe of Europe or
beyond. Rizal's Noli Me Tangere from the Philippines and
Tagore's short stories from Bengal exemplify this possibility
in the late nineteenth century.34
As already noted, the twentieth century, especially its second
half, witnesses a vast expansion of this tendency -- in realism,
modernism, and their successors, some of these last pioneered
beyond the confines of Europe. In short, Don Quijote serves
as the fulcrum of a long tradition of European prose fiction.
The origins of that tradition lie outside Europe; its consolidation
entails constriction to an intra-European perspective; its full
development reverses direction and thereby results in a global
literary form. The implicit totalizing project of the European
novel loses some of its structural implausibility only when the
novel ceases to be distinctively European.
| Go to James Holstun's response. |
| Go to this issue's index. |
1 I am indebted to David Quint of Yale University for his thoughtful and incisive commentary on the Don Quijote section of this essay. I also wish to thank the students in my graduate seminars at Cornell on the Renaissance (2002) and the nineteenth century (2003) for helping me to formulate my ideas.
2 See, for instance, Kenneth R. Andrews, Trade, Plunder and Settlement: Maritime Enterprise and the Genesis of the British Empire, 1480-1630 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984); Robert Brenner, Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict, and London's Overseas Traders, 1550-1653 (Princeton: Princeton University. Press, 1993); and Robin Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern, 1492-1800 (London: Verso, 1997).
3 In English, the standard sources are Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957), and Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism, 1983; rev. ed. (London: Verso, 1991). I attempt to address the problems with the bourgeois nationalist explanation of European prose fiction before 1700 in "The Novel and Cultural Revolution," Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift der Pädagogische Hochschule "Karl Liebknecht" Potsdam, 32 (1988), 29-47, and "The Uniqueness of Spain," in Echoes and Inscriptions: Comparative Approaches to Early Modern Hispanic Literatures, ed. Barbara Simerka and Chris B. Weimer (Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 2000), pp. 17-29.
4 The foundational work about Muslim and Jewish influences on Golden Age Spain is by Américo Castro. For his account of Cervantes in this context, see his Cervantes y los casticismos españoles (Madrid: Alfaguara, 1966), pp. 1-183, and Hacia Cervantes, 3rd ed. (Madrid: Taurus, 1967), pp. 213-474.
5 Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, "Prólogo al lector," in Ocho comedias y entremeses (1615), in Obras completas de Miguel de Cervantes, Vol. II: Teatro (Genoa and Madrid: Turner, 1993), p. 158.
6 Cervantes, Journey to Parnassus (Viaje del Parnaso), trans. James Y. Gibson (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, 1883), prose Appendix (Adjunta, 1614), pp. 274-75.
7 María Antonia Garcés, Cervantes in Algiers: A Captive's Tale (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2002), argues for the traumatic centrality of captivity to Cervantes's literary career and of "The Captive's Tale" to Don Quijote.
8 See Ottmar Hegyi, Cervantes and the Turks: Historical Reality versus Literary Fiction in "La Gran Sultana" and "El amante liberal" (Newark, Delaware: Juan de la Cuesta, 1992).
9 Diana de Armas Wilson, Cervantes, the Novel, and the New World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 29.
10 In addition to Castro, Cervantes y los casticismos españoles and Hacia Cervantes, see Dominique Aubier, Don Quichotte: prophète d'Israël (Paris: Laffont, 1966); Francisco Olmos García, Cervantes en su época (Madrid: Aguilera, 1968), pp. 144-52; Rosa Rossi, Escuchar a Cervantes: un ensayo biográfico, trans. from the Spanish (Valladolid: Ambito, 1988), pp. 19-23, and Sulle tracce di Cervantes: Profilo inedito dell'autore del "Chisciotte" (Roma: Riuniti, 1997), pp. 39-43; Ellen Lokos, "The Politics of Identity and the Enigma of Cervantine Genealogy," in Cervantes and His Postmodern Constituencies, ed. Anne J. Cruz and Carroll B. Johnson (New York: Garland, 1999), pp. 116-33; and Cervantes's leading modern biographer, Jean Canavaggio, Cervantes, trans. J. R. Jones (New York: Norton, 1990) pp. 24-25. Here, as in subsequent citations, the later revision of the original French edition of Canavagggio, Cervantès (Paris: Fayard, 1997), does not offer a different position. Norbert Rehrmann, "Ein Las Casas der peninsularen Minderheiten: Mauren, Zigeuner und Judem im Werk von Cervantes," in Cervantes: estudios en la víspera de su centenario (Kassel: Reichenberger, 1994), pp. 71-95, finds a critique of anti-Muslim sentiment in Don Quijote, a critique that is duplicated in other works by Cervantes, where it is supplemented by a parallel critique of anti-Jewish anti-Semitism.
11 I owe these details to Quint, Cervantes's Novel of Modern Times: A New Reading of "Don Quijote" (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), Ch. 3, passim.
12 Wilson, pp. 96-103, 22, 29, 90, 110-11, 119-25, 136-39, 142-57, and 161-78.
13 The only competitor that immediately comes to mind is Hamlet (1600-01), with which Don Quijote has a number of similarities -- the importance of madness and the related assertion of an inner truth inaccessible to others; itinerant actors, the blurring of life and art, and the advocacy of a mimetic theory of art ultimately derived from Aristotle but of only ambiguous relevance to the work in question; and a deep reliance on popular culture. These parallels may indicate deeper affinities.
14 I pursue this argument in "The Literature of Empire in the Renaissance," forthcoming in Modern Philology. That essay includes the same pages on Don Quijote that appear here.
15 Cervantes, Don Quijote de la Mancha, ed. Martín de Riquer (Barcelona: Juventud, 1965), II:67, pp. 1026-27; Don Quijote, trans. Burton Raffel, ed. Wilson (New York: Norton, 1999), II:67, p. 715. Subsequent references are to these editions and are noted in the text.
16 Rossi, Escuchar a Cervantes, pp. 23-35, and Sulle tracce di Cervantes, pp. 16-17, argues that Cervantes had homosexual experiences while in captivity. This position is challenged by Emilio Sola and José F. de la Peña, Cervantes y la Berbería (Cervantes, mundo turco-berberisco y servicios secretos en la época de Felipe II), 1995; 2nd ed. (Madrid: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1996), pp. 253-75. Canavaggio, Cervantes, pp. 93-94, leaves the question open. For the years in Algerian captivity more generally, see Canavaggio, Cervantes, pp. 76-96.
17 On these episodes, see Olmos García, pp. 71-88; Canavaggio, Cervantes, pp. 238-39; and Johnson, Cervantes and the Material World (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000), pp. 57-68, who emphasizes the underlying economic realities, a point the author also develops in relation to the Captive's Tale. See pp. 71-92.
18 Quint, Cervantes's Novel, provides a detailed and impressive argument for the opposing position, demonstrating the careful placement and thematic cross-references of what I call inset novellas and what he convincingly relates to the interlace structure of Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, a major influence on Don Quijote. Quint's is a more dynamic argument for the structural unity of the work than the approach taken by René Girard, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure, 1961; trans. Yvonne Freccero (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1965), pp. 1-4, 49-52, and 96-104, who connects the Tale of Impertinent Curiosity to the behavior of Don Quijote, Sancho, and many of the minor characters in Part Two through his master category of mediated desire.
19 Discussion of Cide Hamete Benengeli has characteristically taken a formalist route, emphasizing the importance of the fictive first author in undermining a stable reality and sometimes seeing in his presence a mechanism by which Cervantes could distance himself from heterodox utterances. See Castro, Hacia Cervantes, pp. 409-19; E. C. Riley, Cervantes's Theory of the Novel (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962), pp. 205-12, and Don Quixote (London: Allen & Unwin, 1986), pp. 162-63; Francisco Márquez Villanueva, Fuentes literarias cervantinas (Madrid: Gredos, 1973), pp. 244-57, for the influence of Guevara (and, possibly, others) on this function of Cide Hamete; and Robert Alter, Partial Magic: The Novel as Self-Conscious Genre (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), pp. 18-23.
20 Canavaggio, Cervantes, pp. 280-81, however, has his doubts.
21 Critics tend to see Avellaneda primarily as another self-reflexive structural device, much like Cide Hamete Benengeli and not necessarily of inferior authority. See Riley, Cervantes's Theory of the Novel, pp. 212-20; and Jesús G. Maestro, "Cervantes y Avellaneda: creación y transducción del sentido en la elaboración del "Quijote," in Cervantes: estudios en la víspera de su centenario (Kassel: Reichenberger, 1994), I, 309-41, for a semiological account.
22 I have developed much of the argument of this paragraph in "The Novel and Cultural Revolution" and "The Uniqueness of Spain."
23 The argument here depends on the generic distinctions within prose fiction developed by the Chicago Neo-Aristotelians. See Sheldon Sacks, Fiction and the Shape of the Belief: A Study of Henry Fielding with Glances at Swift, Johnson and Richardson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1964), for the distinctions among satire (Swift), apologue (Johnson), and novel (Fielding); and Ralph Rader, "Defoe, Richardson, Joyce, and the concept of Form of the Novel," in Autobiography, Biography, and the Novel, by William Matthews and Rader (Los Angeles: William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, UCLA, 1973), pp. 29-72, for distinctions among pseudo-factual (Defoe), action (Richardson), and modernist (Joyce) forms of the novel.
24 For more than a decade the series Cambridge Studies in Romanticism, by which is meant British Romanticism, has issued a number of studies bearing on questions of empire. See, for instance, Nigel Leask, British Romantic Writers and the East: Anxieties of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Saree Makdisi, Romantic Imperialism: Universal Empire and the Culture of Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Timothy Morton, The Poetics of Spice: Romantic Consumerism and the Exotic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); and Helen Thomas, Romanticism and Slave Narratives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
25 On Baudelaire, for instance, see Christopher L. Miller, Blank Darkness: Africanist Discourse in French (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985).
26 See, for example, Franco Moretti, The Way of the World : The Bildungsroman in European Culture (London: Verso, 1987).
27 Jane Eyre: Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, "Three Women's Texts and a Critique of Imperialism," Critical Inquiry 12 (Autumn 1985): 244-49; Vanity Fair: Patrick Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830-1914 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1988), pp. 73-107, for Thackeray in general, pp. 92-96 for Vanity Fair, and pp. 121-25 and 146-59, for more direct imperial representation in less canonical novels by Bulwer-Lytton and Disraeli; Mansfield Park: Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Knopf, 1993), pp. 84-97. For disagreement with Said, see Moretti, Atlas of the European Novel, 1800-1900 (London: Verso, 1998), pp. 24-29. "Bertram goes to Antigua, then, not because he must go there -- but because he must leave Mansfield Park" (p. 27). And earlier: "He goes, not because he needs the money, but because Austen needs him out of the way" (p. 26). Recognizing that the colonies and colonial fortunes are not directly represented in the English sentimental novels he is considering, Moretti then reads his attractive local formalist insight off exclusively as a product of metropolitan class ideology. "This is the mythic geography -- pecunia ex machina -- of a wealth that is not really produced . . ., but magically 'found' overseas whenever a novel needs it. . . . the link between the wealth of the élite and the 'multitude of labouring poor' of contemporary England can be easily severed . . . . Which is a wonderful thing to know, for heroines that want to marry into it -- and even better, of course, in the decades of the harshest class struggle of modern British history" (p. 27). This argument probably underestimates the weight of both imperialism and of the larger imperatives of fictional form. More generally, however, Moretti's opening chapter suggestively overlaps with the argument that follows, especially on historical fiction (pp. 33-47) and the Russian novel (pp. 29-32).
28 For discussion of Scott's Talisman, set in the Crusades, and of cross-cultural possibilities, see Harry E. Shaw, Narrating Reality: Austen, Scott, Eliot (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), pp. 175-97.
29 Georg Lukács, The Historical Novel, 1937; trans. Hannah and Stanley Mitchell (Boston: Beacon, 1963), pp. 183-96, misses this point in his otherwise illuminating analysis of Salammbô, perhaps because of his insistence that after 1848 society was divided into two opposing classes and that consequently historical novelists could no longer understand the past as a prehistory of the present. Such an approach unduly constrains the useful ways in which the past might be fictively mobilized. Jonathan Culler, Flaubert: The Uses of Uncertainty, 1974; rev. ed. (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985), p. 226, argues that the sacred in Flaubert and in this novel in particular comes "to represent in the allegory of interpretation the formal desire for connection and meaning which governs the activity of readers and characters. . . . the sacred . . . enables them [the novels] to be read as warnings against the tawdry and premature ways of investing things with meaning. . . . but it is noteworthy that to do that Flaubert had to leave his contenporary environment for the quasi-feudal world."
30 Brantlinger, pp. 227-53.
31 This argument cuts against the position taken in two distinguished works, Brantlinger's Rule of Darkness, and Said's pathbreaking Orientalism, 1978; rev. ed. (New York: Vintage, 1994). Both critics rightly refuse to limit the link between literature and imperialism to the land grab at the end of the nineteenth century. In so doing, however, they obscure the generic specificity of the European response.
32 This formulation implies a certain distance from the argument for a more direct connection between the novel and the mid-century crisis over slavery developed by Michael Paul Rogin, Subversive Genealogy: The Politics and Art of Herman Melville (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), pp. 102-51.
33 The unusually direct emphasis on politics and consequent relative attenuation of character in Demons renders problematic two influential interpretations of the novel -- Girard's emphasis on mediated desire and Bakhtin's understanding of the lesser characters as emanations of aspects of the protagonist. See René Girard, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, pp. 59-62, 249-53, and 274-79, and Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), pp. 237-70.
34 Rizal's novel was introduced into contemporary criticism by Anderson, pp. 26-30.